Blizzard Forecasting -- aka, Titan will be a Cellphone/Social Media MMO

He is like a fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail

- Abel, on the writing style of Carl Friedrich Gauss

I apologize in advance for the unprofessional and poorly-argued claims I'm about to make.

Predictions are ultimately bullshit, especially mine, which are the product of intuition and a vague sense of how things "feel" at a given time, and I'm not going to make an incredible amount of effort to justify my claims. I am probably wrong. I understand that.

That said, the crystal ball inside my brain pulls me to the conclusion that the general future of Blizzard is relatively dire. I realize that I say this despite their record-breaking Q3 earnings [1]. I understand they are doing well -- now. But I am personally extremely skeptical they are well positioned to sustain their growth in the future.

• Starcraft 2 is not competing well against League of Legends in the eSports scene [2]
• A large amount of consumer distrust since the botched release of Diablo 3 [3]
• World of Warcraft has been their cash cow for years now, however subscribers are declining, or at best, have plateaued [4]; and they are poorly positioned to recapture that market without a commensurate product in development
• The unnanounced Titan MMO will most likely be a social media MMO, played through a variety of mediums, including the PC, cellphone, Facebook, etc.

The first two points are more or less uncontroversial, so I will not go into great detail about them.

To the extent that we can get subscription data at all, it would appear that WoW is, very slowly, mind you, descending into the twilight of its life cycle. This is extraordinarily bad for Blizzard, as it accounts for a huge percentage of their revenue -- and how, exactly are they going to transition into a post-WoW world? The Diablo franchise is marred, I would argue irreparably, with a plummeting user base and bad reviews. Starcraft is competing futilely against League of Legends in the eSports scene, though Blizzard shares a lot of the blame for this, for locking down tournaments through Battle.Net (no LAN) and telling Kespa -- who share a huge amount of responsibility for building the Korean eSports scene to begin with -- to essentially go fuck themselves.

It seems relatively clear that post-WoW Blizzard has attempted to introduce methods that continually return revenue after launch. Starcraft 2 was pushed hard in the eSports scene and the draconian DRM was used to force tournaments to give Blizzard a cut of the advertisement revenue, which unsurprisingly turned eSports coordinators away from the game. Diablo 3 launched with an in-game real money auction house, from which Blizzard takes a cut of every transaction, and the game was clearly designed to promote its use; however, by some accounts more people are playing Diablo 2 than Diablo 3, and the feature is almost universally criticized as an odd, even exploitative, pyramid scheme. From an outsider's perspective, neither of these schemes seem to have worked out.

So under the assumption that both the Diablo and Starcraft franchises are under-preforming as cash cows, how will Blizzard sustain themselves under the inevitable decline of World of Warcraft? How will Chris Metzen afford his swimming pools full of cocaine?

Their last conceivable hope is their next-generation MMO, codenamed "Titan." For reference, this is approximately what we know about Titan [5]:

• In-game Advertisements (possibly free to play)
• Won't compete with World of Warcraft
• New IP
• Sci-fi, possibly set in near future
• Casual

Now what do I think Titan will be? We don't really know, but I enjoy making predictions for posterity and to rub everyone's' faces in it if I'm right.

So after reading what we know about Project Titan and the general trends and rhetoric we hear from gaming executives, I think that Titan will essentially be something like Google's Ingress, with an expanded client for playing on a PC (and possibly console). Thus,

• Some form of it will be playable on cellphones, tablets, etc.
• It will have heavy social media integration, and you can play some form of it over Facebook, in public, etc.
• I do think there will be a "main game" that is on PC; however, you will be encouraged to play it outside for more rewards
• Possibly some kind of real money auction house, as it is widely believed that Diablo 3 was the test for it
• When I say you can "play it in public," I mean that quite literally. I think some objectives will require you to physically go out, scan QR codes or something, play minigames against anonymous people in your vicinity on your phone, etc. -- all so that you can "play the game" in real life

Essentially, I think it will be a collection of flash and cellphone games distributed over a ton of platforms that you can play around town, over Facebook, will feature a trading house, and will all integrate into a relatively minimal main PC game. It will basically be Ingress, as I mentioned earlier; in fact, I wouldn't even be surprised if it had the same premise and setting: walking around and playing minigames to "hack" things.

Here's the trailer for Ingress, in comparison.

Regardless, I do believe that the future of Blizzard rests on the success of this game. We shall see how it works out -- and it will be very interesting to see how well the upcoming Starcraft 2 expansion sells, as well as the Diablo 3 expansion, if one is even made, which wouldn't surprise me, given the poor state of the game.

Footnotes
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/11/07/blizzard-has-record-revenue-in-q3-2012-thanks-to-pandaria-and-diablo-iii/
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/10/18/starcraft-2-struggles-as-league-of-legends-rises/
[3] Among many: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/07/12/diablo-3-needs-an-endgame-and-fast/
[4] http://mmodata.blogspot.com/
[5] http://www.videogamer.com/features/article/what_is_project_titan_everything_we_know.html